


an angel to keep her watch

by manywheels



Category: Matthew Swift Series - Kate Griffin, The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Crossover, F/F, Gen, Harrow is Matthew Swift, The Locked Tomb Characters in Swiftverse, but like, very loosely
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:07:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26771170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/manywheels/pseuds/manywheels
Summary: Harrowhark was murdered three years ago, but the necropowered urban sorcery of Drearburh House can bring nearly anyone back from the dead, and if there's one thing Harrow knows, it's how to pull your own soul out of the River and back into London.She's going to hunt down everyone who had a hand in her death, even if it does mean she's got to ignore the voice in her head telling her to get out of town before it happens all over again.
Relationships: Gideon Nav & Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 3
Kudos: 15





	an angel to keep her watch

**Author's Note:**

> title from Frank Sinatra's London by Night, written by Carroll Coates. 
> 
> i wrote this having re-read the first Matthew Swift book. i have vague plans for it, but updates, if they come, depend on the flight of the birds. 
> 
> for maybem and terri, whose unfettered delight in the swift books is matched only by their unending enthusiasm for the practical guide to evil. i am grateful also to lapis and ri, who read this and liked it, which is really the only validation i need.

She wakes up amid bone dust, coughing and then retching. Her throat feels dry, like she’s spent the entire night smoking cigarettes. Her head’s ringing, and she’s naked as the day she was born. She looks up, and next to her is a telephone. She’s back in Drearburh, back where it ended.

_ getupgetupgetupnonagesimuslyinghere’sgoingtokillyou _

The words are accompanied with a frenetic energy like an angry hive of bees, rattling around in her skull, waiting to find purchase in her fingers. They hadn’t lived in Drearburh for years, when it came for them. She’d just run to the one place she thought she could rest, just for a few minutes, and between one ragged gasp and the next a great void had opened up. Getting to the telephone had been hell. What came after… She wasn’t ready to think about that yet.

It was her parents’ old bedroom. The dust was thick on the plastic sheets that covered everything. When they’d still been alive Harrow made sure the house was fucking spotless. Cleaners three times a week, a chauffeur to start the car and take it for a drive every other weekend, sheets changed on a rota based on her fuzzy memory of how they lived. Sorcery was magic was life, and goddamn if they weren’t going to make sure her parents were living in deed if not in mind.

But now the dust was thick on their tongue and between their fingers. It covered her, head to toe, and it took her a moment to gather the saliva into her mouth and spit it, like an act of petty defiance against herself. It landed about three centimetres away from where her left cheek was still pressed to the wooden floors, and the energy to even get up seemed impossibly out of reach.

_ nonagesimusthey’recomingforyougetupgetupgetup _

Her fingers twitched, and she remembered her mother telling her that life was magic was the tornado of bones that made up a city, and rolled over. It felt, a little bit, like the first bite of shitty kebab at midnight, with too much chilli sauce and a greasy aftertaste. The words pounded at her still, like someone was speaking to her that she’d known all her life but never seen in person, familiar to one sense and alien to another. 

_ harrowyou’rebackandyou’regoingtojustfuckingdieagainaren’tyouyouuselesssackofcalcium _

She grit her teeth and reached for a leg of the desk next to her. With the strength of a thousand last-minute runs for the 91 bus to Crouch End she heaved herself up. It was good to be standing, even if she was still covered in grime. A few minutes later her vision even cleared up and it seemed that her muscles had not, in fact, atrophied into nothingness, so she decided to get dressed and worry about everything else later.

A look in their mother’s wardrobe yielded a shirt that had been out of fashion even in the seventies and their father’s chest of drawers thankfully had both trousers and socks in the pitch black colour he always wore. As she put them on she felt no particular embarrassment about wearing her dead parents’ clothing, because they’d made it pretty clear they didn’t expect to ever need any of that stuff. She pulled a coat off a hook, and to her mild relief found about forty pounds of cash in the inside pocket. It wouldn’t get her much, but at least she’d fend off desperation for a little while.

She thought of Aiglamene, then. She’d been the first person to really show Harrow what a Ninth cavalier could really do - what a sorcerer in the Ninth tradition could’ve expected from someone who knew how to cover her weaknesses. Aiglamene, covered in blood, her favourite pistol out of bullets and a grim look on her face as she told her to get  _ out _ of London before -

No. She didn’t have the time, the inclination, or the patience for it. If she spent too long thinking about it she’d probably fall right back onto the floor of her parents’ bedroom, and they were getting out of there even if it was just so that they could die again under London’s skies instead.

She probably needed a shower, but it was too late to think about that now. She scratched at her neck and her fingernails came away coated in fine white powder. If she hadn’t been exhausted - if she hadn’t come back from what was almost certainly the sweet embrace of the void itself - she would’ve been able to use just that gunk and the swirl of electric thunder to make herself a brace for her back. Instead she had to settle for one of her father’s canes, leaning on it like it was Crux himself come back to carry her home, and walked out of Drearburh and onto Upper Street, where the grey pallor of the sky and the shade of her lips were in complete concordance.

***

Five years after she was put in charge of herself, Harrowhark saw God. Everyone knew him, of course. He’d been Emperor of All London for time immemorial, it seemed like. God walked among mere mortals when it suited Him, and her father maintained His control of necro-power was second to none. She’d been in Kensington, outside a coffee shop that was overpriced and populated by skinny white teenagers, when she saw Him stroll down the road like it was any other day. But it wasn’t, not for Harrow.

Seeing Him clothed in His flesh, speaking to one of his compatriots, was revelation. It was smelling Smithfield meat market at four in the morning, walking out of Heaven at dawn. She could have reached out and touched him - but she could not have. The moment they walked past her, another caught her eye. Rather forcefully too, because there was no other way her gaze could have been taken away from God’s companion. It was a woman with brown hair with a shock of white at her temples and eyes that pierced the soul, and she had Harrow’s face in her hands.

“Girl, if you know what’s good for you you’ll let the world and its Lord pass you by,” she said. Well, actually she probably hadn’t said that, but that was what Harrow remembered her saying for years after. At that moment she was still consumed by the memory of the Prime Sorcerer of London walking with someone who must have been the Neon Faerie Queen, speaking softly and slowly.

A moment later her gaze snapped on to the warlock she later knew to be the Joy That Slumbered, God’s Saint of Eight Wings. At that moment, however, she knew nothing about the Lyctor Mercymorn, except that her face was stern and forbidding and in every way the opposite of the woman who was walking at God’s side. Harrow was struck dumb, though not for the reason Mercymorn thought, and it was just as well because for the next ten years that moment sealed a conviction in His Saints that Harrow was in awe of Him.

Harrow must have stood there, her face in the hand of a Hand of God, for several minutes. No matter how many times she recalled it the memory of neon never faded. She heard later, over the years, that all of God’s Lyctors had that reaction to Him, one way or another. It was probably what drew Mercymorn’s attention to Harrow in the first place. Then she must have done something, because the Lyctor removed her hand from Harrow’s face and wiped it on her jeans. “Children should know better than to play when the adults are around,” she said. That Harrow remembered very well, because it was the moment that the neon faded. By the time she turned around to look in the direction God had walked, both he and the Queen had disappeared. When she turned back to look at Mercymorn, the same had happened to her.

***

Harrow drank Upper Street in. More time must have passed than she’d thought, while she was… indisposed, because the gentrification that had only started when she’d last walked down here was now in full bloom. Her favourite hairdresser - a Turkish woman and her endless stream of ‘fiances’ - had finally drowned under the tide of cash and white teeth. There were three - count them,  _ three _ \- Pret A Mangers in eyeshot, and probably another nestled inside the shopping centre. 

As she walked down towards Highbury Fields, it struck her that she knew even less than she thought she did. There was an unfamiliar edge to Islington that she couldn’t place, and for all that Harrow hated it she knew its nooks and crannies better than any ten hipsters. Abruptly she turned onto a sidestreet, making for the canal, before turning right back around. Three plans made and discarded in the space of a single rolly before settling on one. A woman pushing a pram looked at her with some concern before Harrow smiled at her in the most unsettling way she could manage. She responded by rolling her eyes and continuing on her way. At least things had not changed so much that her behaviour deserved anything more. 

She walked into a supermarket and bought herself the smallest, cheapest bottle of vodka she could find. Then tobacco and all that went with it. Not condoms, because she intended to be careful enough. A copy of the Economist, and one of Hello! magazine. And three pairs of the thickest socks she could find. The cashier ringing up her bill gave her a glance as if to check whether she was old enough, and then shifted their gaze back to their screen. Nobody could pay them to be more disinterested, and in the middle of the morning there was no rush, either.

_ it’sastupidideanonagesimusyouneedtogetoutoftownbeforetheyfindusnotwanderabout _

She put all of her purchases in the various pockets of her jacket, and briefly considered a plastic bag. But Priamhark had always quietly disapproved of them, and while about most things his advice meant as much as a wet croissant to a parking meter in this case she was probably better off heeding it. Then she set off for the canal, looking for someone who was neither friend nor enemy.

Regent’s Canal was as overgrown and mossy as she remembered it being. It took a little walking to find a bench on which she could set up - the rain would at least deter some of the joggers though many would brave the depressing drizzle anyway. Then she rolled herself a smoke and lit it. The first gasp of that cigarette was relief. It was being alive - _ alive _ \- and on her own two feet. Nothing would ever match it.

Then she opened the Economist, and read an article about interest rates in Ghana. Hello! Magazine had a whole spread about someone in Eastenders having had surgery on their ears. No less than four joggers went past her, all of them mindless to everything except the beat of their hearts, though one nodded at her as she went by. She took one swig, then two, of vodka. An hour passed this way, while she did every quiz in celebrity mag and then spent ten minutes looking at oil prices. 

For all that Harrow couldn’t stand it, she couldn’t deny that Islington was like a second skin. She was made for sitting on that bench, socks in her jacket, watching the rain fall on the canal. For a pair of breaths the ceaseless energy of the city expanded in her lungs. Then she downed the rest of her vodka and with a formless anger threw the bottle at the wall across from her. It arced a little and with a tinkling noise broke utterly. The pages of the magazine in her hand were well and truly ruined, which was why she instead started rolling another cigarette.

“Well, I wasn’t expecting to see  _ you _ again, friend o’ mine,” they said. Harrow looked to her left, and the Lord of the Alleyways was standing right where they were supposed to be.

_ youfuckingidiotareyoureallygoingtohowareyoulikethisicannotbelieveit _

Harrow’s voice nearly didn’t make it out of her mouth, but the vodka had properly oiled it back into something resembling shape. “I wasn’t expecting to see anyone ever again, really,” she rasped.

Harrow, the Lord of the Alleyways, for whom Priamhark and Pelleamena had named their daughter, grinned at her. She motioned to the bench, and threw the socks at them.

“Completely new! How exciting. You’ve always known how to pique my interest, little H,” they said, sitting down next to her.

She finished rolling her cigarette, and passed it to them. They accepted it with a nod, and lit it using a lighter that probably had not existed before that moment. 

“Aah, that’s the stuff. You know, since your parents nobody’s really held to the older forms. It’s all cracked smartphone screens and lovers’ arguments now. A gossip mag and a bottle of vodka really hits the spot,” they said. Though the drizzle hadn’t let up their clothes were completely dry. They were wearing a fake-leather jacket that had seen better days and a woolen beanie with holes in it. Their skin was completely soaked, and they were busy ripping the socks open to use them as gloves.

“I need a favour,” Harrow-the-sorcerer said. She hated it, sometimes, knowing that there was something out there with her name and a million nights of winter’s cold. 

“A favour? For my favourite sorcerer come back from the dead? Now that’ll cost you more than some socks, little H,” Harrow-the-Lord said. “You didn’t bring any chocolate?”

“Chocolate’s bad for your teeth,” Harrowhark said. “And I can give you more than the socks. But only after you answer my questions.”

Harrowhark had first met her namesake when she was seven. She’d run off from her mother to see - well, she’d run off. And then she turned in the wrong direction and ran smack dab into four angry men in leather speaking to the Lord of Alleyways. In a second the anger ceased. The Lord looked at her and said “My darling, you shouldn’t give your poor mum so much trouble,” and walked her back to Drearburh.

It was that way they were looking at her now.

“London’s not safe for you or yours, little H,” they said.

“They  _ killed _ me. I already know,” Harrowhark replied.

“No, you don’t. You’ve been gone what, three years? London’s been at war, little H. Most everyone’s either dead or fled or both. The boy with the glasses you used to hang out with blew himself up not four months ago. Your religious fanatic friend shot his mouth off and his own people killed him for it. And your God doesn’t do  _ jackshit _ about it,” they said. They’re still laid-back, one hand in a sock and the other holding the vodka bottle Harrow’d thrown at the canal, but there’s a furrow in their brow, now.

“ _ Something  _ came for me. A void like I’ve never seen before. It ripped  _ through _ the wards on Drearburh like they were tissue,” Harrow said. She wasn’t going to let them scare her off, but they weren’t wrong.

“There’s more than that. We’ve gone underground, most of us. Upney’s holed up in Soho, the Seven Sisters stay on the Victoria. I haven’t seen Alice in months. And it’s that fucker’s fault, I can feel it,” Harrow-the-Lord said, taking a swig out of the bottle.

“What’s that got to do with whatever came after me?” Harrowhark asked.

_ whyareyoustilltalkingtothemicouldpunchyourightnowharrowaaaaaaaaaargh _

“You really don’t know? How - you’re sitting right there, little H, and you really don’t know?” Harrow-the-Lord said. “You were the first, weren’t you?”

Harrowhark Nonagesimus, urban sorcerer and a necropowered mystic in the tradition of the Ninth, had no answer to that. But in the back of her mind a suspicion grew.

“Telling it to you straight’s going to cost me, little H. If you really don’t know, and if you want me to spell it out for you? This is no small secret and the alleys don’t give anyone something for nothing, you hear?” they said.

She looked at them, and saw the faintest traces of fear in their eyes. 

“Tell me,” she said.

“Where’s Gideon, little H?” they asked, and Harrow’s heart stopped entirely.

_ waitwaitareyoureallyhowthefuckharrowyou’rethemostsmoothbrainednecromanceralivehow _

“You really have just come back, haven’t you? I can see her behind your eyes but I don’t think you’ve looked in a mirror. Where’s Gideon gone?” they asked.

It struck Harrow, at that moment, that she had in fact had another option out there. Someone she’d trust with her life. Someone who’d trusted her life to her. And she’d very carefully not thought about any of that, because -

_ HARROWIFYOUMAKETHISABOUTMENOWAFTERIGNORINGMEFORTHEENTIREDAY _

\- she was dead. And gone. Because Cytherea had come for her and God had not stopped her but  _ Gideon _ had tried. There was glass digging into her throat. It was the vodka and the cigarettes.

“Harrow, she’s in there with you,” they said, their voice gravelled with infinite care and gentleness.

“No. She’s gone. They  _ killed _ her. And me. It was a spell, a curse of some kind. It ripped through -  _ how could -”  _ Harrow stumbled over her words. Her namesake of broken bottles and the cold embrace of the night did not offer her any comfort, but neither did they laugh at her misery.

“It wasn’t a spell, little H. We’re still not sure exactly what it was, but it was the first. There’s more of them now, roaming around London. The Ghosts in the Underground? They went missing two years ago last winter. The Bag Lady’s the only one they’re scared of. The rest of us? We keep our ears to the ground. We avoid them when they appear. And we die if they catch us. But you survived,” they said.

_ harrowwespenttwentyyearshurlinginsultandimprecationateachotherwhoelsecouldhaveeven _

_ triedpullingmeoutofvoicesandaforgottenphonenumberbutyouandifyoueventhinkaboutitfora _

_ secondyou’dknowthati’ddoitalloveragainifitmeantyougotoutoflondonthisfuckingsecondyou _

_ MORON _

They were both silent for a moment.

“I tried. I tried to survive it, and I tried to do what my father taught me. But it had been ten years and I couldn’t do it. Instead I have - words. Emotions. Like someone yelling at me from across a very crowded room. I have the instincts of someone who should be dead,” Harrow choked out.

“No, little H. You succeeded. You think anyone else could have done it? The Emperor of All London couldn’t have pulled her out of the River using the entire DLR. You brought her back,” they said.

“She wants me to leave. To get out of town. But I’m not going to,” Harrow said.

_ HARROWISWEARIFIHAVETOPUNCHYOUUSINGJUSTMYVOICEIWILL _

The Lord of Alleyways gave her a smile.

“Then what are you going to do instead?” they asked her.

“I’m going to find the person who killed her. Who killed Aiglamene. And I’m going to gut them like a fucking fish,” Harrow said. “Will you help me?”

“Another pair of socks, and we might have a bargain,” Harrow-the-Lord replied, as they disappeared the bottle of vodka into their jacket. 

* * *

  
  



End file.
